Premier and Cabinet Department

Mr KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens) (14:55): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. My question is to the Premier. What comments did the Premier or his staff make regarding the cabinet office staff that caused the deputy chief executive officer of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet to caution the Premier?

The SPEAKER: Premier, would you like to have a go at that?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:55): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I think I can absolutely say unequivocally there was no caution provided by staff members to the Premier or the Premier's office. The reality is that, on coming to government—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER Order!

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL: —we made it very clear that we would be a very different government from the previous government, and one of the things in particular that we spoke about in the early days of coming to government and assuming this incredible privilege and responsibility on behalf of the people of South Australia was a different methodology of operating. We wanted to move to a full cabinet orientation, and this meant that we would be relying very strongly on the work of the cabinet office.

I met with the chief executive, Ruth Ambler, of the cabinet office, and I expressed to her a change in orientation from the previous government. In fact, the cabinet meets twice per week. We meet on Mondays and we meet again on Thursdays. So, this morning we met following Executive Council, where all members of the cabinet who are present in Adelaide and available attend Executive Council with His Excellency the Governor of South Australia, the Hon. Hieu Van Le, and then after he departs we resume the second cabinet meeting for the week.

We believe that the cabinet working together produces much better results than other methodologies. Now, I am not going to criticise other methodologies, but it seemed to me that under the previous government we seemed to have lots of decisions being made on the fly, lots of papers being deposited on the cabinet table without a lot of consultation with other government departments. We hear a lot of, I suppose, compliments from within departments that they are being fully consulted, which leads me to believe that they probably weren't being that consulted previously under the previous arrangement.

I met with Ruth Ambler. I met with the senior people within the cabinet office to tell them about the arrangements that we were putting in place. There was no caution that was provided. I think it was more excitement about the opportunity to work with the new government, which was going to treat our senior bureaucrats, and in particular our cabinet office, with absolute respect.